February 26, 2013

The life of a magazine writer, pre-1880

"The people who write now for the magazines do not know what a hard time we had of it once. There was nothing for a lad driven to literature to do, but to go about in shabby clothes, to live upon his father or his friends, to be considered an idiot or a maniac, and to exhaust utterly everybody's patience." — Charles Taber Congdon, in "Reminiscences of a Journalist," 1880.